Facebook's New Timeline Algorithm

As Brand pages on Facebook fight harder and harder to stay relevant in the friend zone of their follower’s newsfeeds, an upcoming Facebook algorithm shift will hurt reach for a majority of brands, reducing their content in many people’s timelines. This means that brands will have an even tougher time getting their organic, unpaid content placed prominently in people’s feeds. The trick to upping your brand’s chances? Make your content even more share-worthy.

The latest algorithm shift is focusing more on the family and friends of a person, with a lesser focus on organic branded content. Now, your Page’s reach is even more dependent on people sharing your Page posts with their friends.

“If a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts,” Facebook engineering director Lars Backstrom said in a company blog post announcing the latest news feed algorithm tweak.

Drive for the Friend Zone

Why is Facebook doing this you ask? Simply put, they want to stay in the friend zone. The social network has been pretty regularly recalibrating its news feed algorithm over the past few years to better sift through all the posts from friends, family members, brands, publishers and celebrities to find the ones that someone will most likely want to see. Facebook has even added ways for people to hand-pick the posts they most want to see atop their news feed.

How do you get your content to reach as many users as possible outside of creating more shareable content? Boost posts. Adding a paid component to your Facebook strategy has now become crucial to effectively reaching your audience. Facebook’s pay-to-play tactic has been in effect for years but this algorithm update puts more emphasis on it than ever. It’s time to adjust your social strategy to include a paid component if you haven’t done that already.